Singularity and consciousness: A neuropsychological contribution

Abstract

In common sense experience based on introspection, consciousness is singular. There is only one 'me' and that is the one that is conscious. This means that 'singularity' is a defining aspect of 'consciousness'. However, the three main theories of consciousness, Integrated Information, Global Workspace and Recurrent Processing theory, are generally not very clear on this issue. These theories have traditionally relied heavily on neuropsychological observations and have interpreted various disorders, such as anosognosia, neglect and split-brain as impairments in conscious awareness without any reference to 'the singularity'. In this review, we will reexamine the theoretical implications of these impairments in conscious awareness and propose a new way how to conceptualize consciousness of singularity. We will argue that the subjective feeling of singularity can coexist with several disunified conscious experiences. Singularity awareness may only come into existence due to environmental response constraints. That is, perceptual, language, memory, attentional and motor processes may largely proceed unintegrated in parallel, whereas a sense of unity only arises when organisms need to respond coherently constrained by the affordances of the environment. Next, we examine from this perspective psychiatric disorders and psycho-active drugs. Finally, we present a first attempt to test this hypothesis with a resting state imaging experiment in a split-brain patient. The results suggest that there is substantial coherence of activation across the two hemispheres. These data show that a complete lesioning of the corpus callosum does not, in general, alter the resting state networks of the brain. Thus, we propose that we have separate systems in the brain that generate distributed conscious. The sense of singularity, the experience of a 'Me-ness', emerges in the interaction between the world This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Electromagnetic Field Theories of Consciousness: Opportunities and Obstacles

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“…One can consciously and subliminally be aware of a plurality of experiences, yet retain the experience of singularity. There can be several experiences and representations generated in a brain, with or without a representational unity, which, nevertheless, belongs to and is experienced by one subject [for a more detailed analysis of this point see ( De Haan et al, 2021 )]. A ‘split subjective identity’ resulting from split-brain in the sense of a symptomatology similar to what we know from dissociative identity disorder characterized by the disruption of identity in two distinct personalities, differing not just in sensory-motor functioning or depersonalization disorders, but also each with two psychological behaviors, characters, affects, social preferences, and experienced as alternating ‘possessions’ with cognitive discontinuities and different memories of autobiographical information, as observed by others and reported by the (alternating) subjects themselves, is not observed.…”

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“…The model is the best possible representation of the moment-to-moment niche-relevant (action-relevant) information an organism can generate, a Gestalt , or in Merker’s terms a “best-estimate buffer.” Information that is at a lower level than niche-relevant, such as the unanalyzed retinal vector-field, is not represented in P-consciousness because it is not niche-relevant. Living organisms have sensory and other systems that have evolved to supply such information, albeit in a coarse form relative to the information actually comprising their environment (e.g., de Vries and Ward, 2016 ; Feinberg and Mallatt, 2016 ; Morsella et al, 2016 ; de Haan et al, 2021 ).…”